Tragic Longing for a Lost Country
Moggallan Bharti
YAAR MERA HAJJ KARA DE by By Rajinder Arora Setu Prakashan, 2023, 135 pp., INR 250.00
October 2024, volume 48, No 10

To those like me, born decades after the Partition of the subcontinent, it is difficult to imagine the lives and the sufferings of the millions who lived, died, and survived those insufferable times. The sheer scale of the human tragedy wherein a million people died and even a greater number inevitably displaced can’t be solely understood through the accounts of people’s sufferings and macabre descriptions. A human misfortune of this magnitude doesn’t just disappear from public memory with the passage of time. Literature on the grief and collective misery of the partitioned people is a growing field with numerous ground-breaking works enriching the discipline. In a similar vein, Yaar Mera Hajj Kara De is a distinct work which is written as a travelogue, but at the same time is evocative of the tragic and avoidable Partition of the mosaic of culture bonded only by memory today. It’s a story of a son’s effort to fulfill his father’s lasting desire to take him to Lahore—the city of his birth, which lies on the other side of the border after Partition. With an engrossed telling of events,

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